Guards directed them to the registration office, where a clerk gave out housing assignments. “You’ve come at a good time,” he said. “When the camp first opened there weren’t enough barracks and we were assigning eight or more people per apartment. Now, with new construction almost finished, we can accommodate a family of four to each one. But since there are thirteen in your family…” He asked Ralph, “Mr. Watanabe, you aren’t married?”
Ralph said dryly, “No, thanks for mentioning that, Mom forgot today.”
Etsuko blushed and scolded, “Ryuu!”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to assign you to the bachelors’ quarters.”
Ruth started to object. “Now, wait—”
“It’s okay, Sis,” Ralph said with equanimity. Then, to the Nisei: “I’ll take the penthouse. With a view of the tumbleweeds if possible.”
The clerk laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.” He found Ralph a suitable spot and gave the family directions to their new living quarters in Block 31. They walked out into what felt like the mouth of a blast furnace but was only First Street. The town hall and post office were on one side of the street, the police station and offices of the Manzanar Free Press on the other. It felt at least ninety degrees in the shade as a hot wind raked sand across their faces.
“Well, it may be isolated,” Ralph noted, “but on the bright side, it’s also hotter than hell.”
Manzanar was laid out in a grid pattern of thirty-six blocks, each clearly enumerated; finding their assigned barrack was not difficult. Each block contained fourteen barracks plus a mess hall, recreation hall, latrines, and laundries. The blocks were widely spaced with large open areas every four blocks that served as firebreaks in an arid environment packed with combustible timber. The monotony of the grid pattern and the drab tar-paper construction was occasionally relieved by colorful “pleasure parks”—green spaces alongside barracks or mess halls where residents had dug koi ponds, planted trees, and decorated with fragments of clear quartz, red amethyst, and silver-gray hematite foraged from the surrounding mountains.
Ruth was surprised to see scores of children in the streets, shooting marbles or tossing softballs back and forth. To the children, it seemed, Manzanar was an adventure, a giant sandbox to play in. Ruth couldn’t help but smile at their energy and innocence, while Peggy, Donnie, Jack, and Will were excited to see so many potential playmates.
Ralph found his quarters in Block 20, Barrack 2, Apartment 1, which he was to share with five other bachelors. One of them, Satoru Kamikawa, was also from Florin, and wrote for the Manzanar Free Press. He and Ralph hit it off immediately, and Ralph told his family he would catch up with them after they were settled in.
They went on to their new home: Block 31, Barrack 3, Apartments 1–3. There was a construction crew of Nisei men working on Barrack 5, and Frank asked them whether these buildings were new construction.
“Not new,” the foreman said, “but a helluva lot better. These shacks were put up in a hurry—no insulation, no flooring other than wood planks. We’ve been putting in drywall and Celotex lining, laying down linoleum…”
“You a contractor by trade?” Frank asked.
The man laughed. “I’ve got a degree in history from USC. The WRA trained us. It’s up to you to decide how well.”
Each “apartment”—a single room—was twenty by twenty-five feet, furnished with the requisite single light bulb dangling from the ceiling, four steel cots fitted with mattress covers (to be filled later with hay), two brown Army blankets per person, and a large Coleman oil heater. The walls and ceiling had been newly lined with plasterboard and buttressed with Sheetrock, and the linoleum floor was a cheerful red.
“Compared to the horse stalls,” Horace’s wife, Rose, observed, “this is like something out of Good Housekeeping.”
“Are we gonna live here, Mommy?” Donnie asked.
“Yes we are, sweetie. You like it?” Ruth asked.
“Yeah. It doesn’t smell like poop.”
They all laughed, then heard, from behind them, the voice of another child: “Hi!”
Ruth turned to see a grinning boy, maybe twelve years old, standing in the open doorway of their apartment.
“Well, hi,” she said, “who are you?”
“Akio,” he answered, but before he could say anything more, the boy’s mother—a dignified-looking woman wearing round eyeglasses—appeared beside him in the doorway. She bowed to the new arrivals. “My apologies for my son’s intrusion into your privacy.”
“If this place is anything like Tanforan,” Ruth said, “I’m not sure there’s much privacy to intrude on.”
The woman laughed and introduced herself as Teru Arikawa; she and her family lived in Barrack 4, opposite them. She invited her new neighbors over for tea and rice cakes, where they met her husband, Takeyoshi; sons Akio, Burns, and Robert; and their two daughters, Alice and Helen. In addition there were two framed photos of sons James and Frank, who were both serving in the United States Army.
“I thought the Army wasn’t accepting Nisei,” Ruth said, confused. “Aren’t we all classified as … enemy aliens?”
“Frank joined before the war and James enlisted after Pearl Harbor, before the ban went into effect,” Takeyoshi said proudly. “They cannot go into combat, but they are still serving their country, at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.”
Ruth took in their neat and comfortable apartments and asked, “This is lovely. How long have you all been here?”
“Since June,” Teru said. “Oh, you should have seen it then! There were holes in the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling—the wind blew right through them. At night, even with the heater on, it was freezing cold.”
“Below freezing,” her husband corrected. “We had to go to bed with our clothes and coats on. And in the morning we woke up with sand all over our blankets, our faces, in our mouths … you are lucky to have come now.”
The families exchanged stories of their internment and of their roots in Japan until a panel truck drove up with the Watanabes’ furniture and other household items. “Thank you so much for the tea and rice cakes,” Etsuko told Teru. “We are fortunate to have such gracious neighbors.”
“As are we,” Teru said with a small bow.
* * *
Ruth, Frank, Donnie, and Peggy settled into the first apartment; Horace, Rose, Jack, and Will into the second; and Taizo, Etsuko, Jiro, and Nishi into the third. Taizo was unhappy at having to share a room with Jiro, but there was simply no alternative arrangement. His family knew only that there had been a falling out between them and that Taizo blamed Jiro for their being here. Ruth could hardly blame her father; his fraternal devotion had cost him dearly.
They hung up window curtains, nailed shelves to the walls; tapestries and silk scarves softened the drab edges of the barrack. At five o’clock the family was summoned to dinner by mess hall bells that pealed three times a day. The meal was decent enough—fish, rice, and uri, a yellow Japanese melon—and that night the oil heater kept them mostly warm. But to be safe, Etsuko ordered some heavier blankets from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
After breakfast Frank applied for a job at their mess hall while Ruth, Peggy, and Donnie braved another dust storm—handkerchiefs held over their mouths to avoid breathing in the sand—to enroll in one of the camp’s eighteen nursery schools. It was bright and airy, with simple homemade furniture. Most girls wore summer dresses and the boys overalls, but several boys were in short pants—understandable in this heat—and Ruth made note to sew Donnie a pair. “You two be good, okay? I’ll see you this afternoon.”
The dust storm had passed and as she walked back along B Street, Ruth felt mildly encouraged. At least the accommodations here were an improvement over Tanforan. Then, as she neared the intersection with Eighth Street, she heard voices raised in argument.
About a block away a trash truck was idling near the curb, manned by three bellicose men—she would later learn they were Kibei: born in America but educa
ted in Japan—shouting at two Nisei men nearby.
“Do not believe the lies the hajukin feed you!” one Kibei yelled. “The Americans are being beaten at Guadalcanal! They have no more warplanes left, no aircraft carriers!”
“Ah, bullshit,” the first Nisei shot back.
“You are fools,” another man on the truck shouted, “throwing your lot in with the hajukin! When Japan wins this war, they will kill traitors like you!”
As if this wasn’t alarming enough, Ruth now noticed that the garbage truck was flying two flags: a black pirate flag, of all things, replete with a white skull-and-crossbones, and another banner proclaiming, in Japanese, MANZANAR BLACK DRAGON ASSOCIATION.
“Screw you and Tojo too!” the second Nisei spat out, as he and his friend turned and walked away.
This inflamed the Kibei, who gunned the engine. The truck lurched forward, nearly sideswiping the two Nisei, who reared back just in time.
The truck came roaring down the street, oblivious, it seemed, to Ruth. She jumped back as it barreled through the intersection, honking its horn.
She leaned against a barrack wall, her heart hammering, not knowing whether to scream or to laugh. A garbage truck flying the Jolly Roger? Really? And yet there were other people on the street who seemed to take no undue notice of the truck. What just happened here?
Back home, she decided not to mention what she had seen. Ralph dropped by to tell the family that Satoru had gotten him a job with the Manzanar Free Press as a copy boy. “Eighty percent of the people here work,” he said. “Only sixteen bucks a month, but that buys a lot of gum and cigarettes. There’s even an agricultural project south of the camp—farmlands where we grow our own food.” Horace decided on the spot to apply for a job on the farm crew. Taizo felt a stirring of hope and excitement for the first time since evacuation, and he surprised Horace by announcing he, too, would apply. “Why not?” he asked. “I am a farmer; why not farm here?”
Only Jiro had no interest in work, intending to occupy himself by writing to his daughters and to anyone in Japan who might know of Akira’s whereabouts. “I am sixty-four years old. I consider myself reborn,” he declared airily, referring to the tradition of kanreki, when a man reaches the age of sixty-one and is “reborn” into another cycle of life.
Taizo shook his head in evident disgust. “Some of us,” he said coldly, “are not afraid of a hard day’s work.” He and Horace left to sign up.
At which point Nishi—displaying a moxie quite uncharacteristic for her—dropped her husband’s dirty laundry into his lap and countered, “Reborn man may change his own diapers.”
Jiro looked down at the wrinkled underwear in his lap—and then roared with laughter.
Even more surprisingly, he got up and took it to the laundry shed.
Nishi, watching him leave, actually seemed saddened by this.
“His spirit is broken,” she said softly. “He loved to work. He loved our son. They are both gone from his life now.”
And for the first time any of them had seen, Nishi began to weep. Etsuko folded her arms around her and let her mourn her missing child.
* * *
Manzanar was always intended to be self-supporting, with the desert adjacent to the camp cleared of sagebrush and leveled for farmland. The fierce wind had carved out sand dunes worthy of the Kalahari; internee crews did the hauling of sand and leveling by hand. They also reconditioned eight miles of irrigation ditches dug back in the 1900s, with water to be drawn from mountain streams flowing down from the heights of the Sierra Nevada. The soil was light and sandy, so fertilizers were required to make the land arable again. As water flowed into the arid soil, the land drank it in like someone abandoned for dead in the desert. In May a late planting was done, and now, in late September, Horace and Taizo—part of an internee crew of men in denims and wide-brimmed hats, carrying bentō lunches and canteens of water—walked through the camp’s south gate, past the barbed wire, to reap the fall harvest.
Fanning out from the base of majestic Mount Williamson were 120 acres of cultivated farmland as green and fertile as any Taizo had ever seen: fields of lettuce, red ripe tomatoes, and small yellow peppers; radishes for pickled daikon; rows of tall cornstalks; the uri melons that had tasted so good at dinner; and the dark green rinds of kabocha, Japanese winter squash.
The crew was entirely Nisei, with a handful of Issei. Taizo was frankly amazed that they had been let out of camp without Army supervision. As they crossed Bairs Creek toward the farm fields, Taizo said as much to the foreman, a farmer from Fresno, who laughed: “Wasn’t always like this. Up until June we had five hajukin foremen overseeing us. Knuckleheads didn’t know a goddamn thing about farming.”
“What happened in June?” Horace asked.
“A hundred of us quit in protest. That got the Army’s attention, and now the only hajukin in the Agriculture Section are the farm superintendent and his assistant, who know enough about farming to let us go do our jobs.”
“And they are not afraid we will run away?” Taizo asked.
“We convinced them that no Japanese would dishonor himself by running away after committing to do a job. They decided to trust us.”
“Most honorable of them,” Taizo said wryly.
“Careful,” the foreman joked, “saying anything good about the administration can get you branded an inu.”
“A dog?” Horace said, puzzled.
“A spy. FBI informant.”
“Do such informants actually exist?” Taizo asked.
“How do you think the Feds knew who to arrest after Pearl Harbor? They had help.” He let it go at that and Taizo did not inquire further.
Horace and Taizo were assigned to harvest the daikon, which had to be picked before the ground froze. The foreman continued, “Up here it can drop to twenty-two below zero by the first of October, and drop fast. Use the small trowels to check the roots, and don’t forget to drink plenty of water—it’ll be over ninety degrees by noon.”
Taizo had done this so often that he had no need for the small trowel. With his fingers he gently scraped away soil around the radish’s leaves, enough to expose the roots: they were at least an inch long, ready to be harvested. He grabbed the plant by the leaves, wiggled it a little to gently loosen it from the soil, then pulled. Taizo smiled at the fine white tuber, placed it in a wooden crate, and moved on to the next one.
He worked his way down the row, only occasionally finding a root too small to be harvested. He was surprised by how quickly he worked up a sweat in this dry heat, but paid it no mind. He paused and gazed up at the soaring peaks of the Sierra—at the “purple majesty” of these American titans—and paradoxically felt almost as if he were back in Japan.
“Hey, Pop, slow down and stop showing me up, huh?”
Taizo wiped perspiration from his brow and glanced back at Horace’s teasing smile. Taizo was truly happy for the first time since he left Florin, but as the hours wore on he was bothered by brief but painful cramps in his calves and thighs—muscles twitching as if they were the strings of a shamisen being plucked. At first he thought he was simply out of shape, but by the end of the day the spasms had spread to his shoulders, something he had never experienced even when shouldering a heavy wooden yoke. After one particularly painful cramp he could not stop himself from grunting; the foreman heard this and approached him.
“Watanabe-san, are you all right?”
“Yes, fine,” Taizo lied. “Just a little cramp. I must have pulled a muscle.”
“Where does it hurt?”
Embarrassed that he had betrayed his discomfort, Taizo told him.
“That’s all, just cramps? No dizziness, fatigue…?”
“No, no.”
The foreman nodded. “Heat cramps,” he said, without undue concern. “Working in this broiling sun can bring them on.”
“I have been drinking water, as you told us to—”
“Dr. Goto says it’s got something to do with not enough sodium. Go hom
e, rest in a cool place if you can find it. Maybe drink some water mixed with salt. If you’re not better by tomorrow, go to the hospital.”
“And if I am better?”
“Get some salt pills to bring to work and I’ll see you at six.”
Taizo was relieved that the cramps were something ordinary and common. Trying not to limp, he made his way back to the camp’s south gate.
At home, Etsuko mixed a tablespoon of salt with a quart of water and poured her husband a glass. Taizo took a swallow and tried not to blanch.
“Is it that bad?” Etsuko asked.
“Not quite as bad as the carp’s blood I was given for pneumonia when I was twelve.” But he drank two full glasses, then lay down on his cot. “I think I will rest here for a while. Go to dinner without me.”
“I will bring something back for you.”
“If they have more uri,” he said, “that would not be amiss.”
Etsuko said worriedly, “Perhaps you should wait a day or two before going back to work…”
“I shall be fine, Okāsan.”
He closed his eyes. Within minutes he was asleep.
And he was right: the next morning he felt strong and refreshed, free from cramps. Horace went to the dispensary to get his father some salt pills, and together they headed back to work.
* * *
After dropping off the children at nursery school, Ruth made the long walk to the post office in Block 1 to pick up the family’s mail. Standing in line behind a Nisei woman about her age, Ruth watched as a military policeman inspected a package the woman was picking up. Ruth squirmed a little as she recognized its contents: several bright orange tins of Sheik Condoms. Satisfied there was no illegal contraband in the package, the MP handed it to the woman.
As she turned, the woman saw Ruth staring at the open package. “I—I’m sorry,” Ruth said, blushing in embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to—”
The woman looked at her with eyes like black ice, said bluntly, “I refuse to raise children in a concentration camp,” and walked out.
Daughter of Moloka'i Page 15
